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interviewed all gave him credit for the
modernizing impulse. Not so the cler-
ics, who tended not to bring him up or
to suggest that the push to modernize
was a historical inevitability.
"It was a normal development," Car-
dinalJorge María Mejía, who was Car-
dinal Librarian from 1998 to 2003, just
after Boyle left, told me in Rome. We
met on a hot afternoon in his large apart-
ment in Trastevere, in the Palazzo San
Calisto, a five-story residence for elderly
cardinals that stands just across a little pi-
azza from a restaurant, the Arco di San
Calisto, that is a favorite among Roman
foodies. When I knocked on his front
door, which opens onto a terrace filled
with potted flowering plants and small
trees, Mejía, who is eighty-seven now,
answered himself. A smallish, fine-
featured Argentine who speaks a precise,
old-fashioned English, he was wearing a
short-sleeved white shirt, a white dog
collar, dark trousers, and Birkenstocks.
Briskly ushering me through the high-
ceilinged foyer, he showed me into a spa-
cious, book-filled sitting room whose
coffee table prominently featured, among
other bric-a-brac, a sizable menorah. (In
1977, Mejía was named Secretary of the
Pontifical Commission for Religious Re-
lations with the Jews.)
The Cardinal has a sly sense of
humor. When I asked him whether
being appointed Librarian was some-
thing hè d wanted, he shot me an amused
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look. "In the Roman Curia you never get
what you want!" He laughed and then
added, 'Well, it's very rare that you get
what you want!" He explained to me that
in 1998, at the moment he'd been pre-
paring for his retirement-he was then
seventy-five, the age at which cardinals
typically retire-John Paul II asked him
to assume the responsibilities of Librar-
ian. "The Pope thought I had the quali-
ties to take this job, and I was very happy
to do it," he said. Among those qualities,
clearly, were a certain forthrightness and
a dexterous way with the media; it was
Mejía who oversaw the release of files
from the Papacy of Pius XII after that
Popès relations with the Hitler regime
had prompted a public outcry.
Mejía was eager to point out that al-
though the decision to confront the Vat's
physical and structural problems came just
after his departure, certain aspects of the
modernization-the decision to use com-
puter tagging for the printed books, for
instance-had already become a priority
when he arrived. "I should like to note,"
he told me, pointing with a smile at my
digital recorder, "that the first step in that
direction had mostly to do with security.
You know, the library is enormous, and
it's open to robberies or disappearances of
material. When I took office, I was given
a kind of list of material most recently
disappeared. It was not very large but it
was, anyway, very unpleasant." The Vat
has indeed a long history of security
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problems. When Montaigne visited, in
1581, he noticed that the books were
chained to the desks; four centuries later,
in 1987, an art-history professor from
Ohio State University waltzed out of the
Vat with pages from a fourteenth-cen-
tury manuscript that had once belonged
to Petrarch. These problems stem in part
from the fact that it has always operated
on optimistic assumptions about schol-
arly integrity, and networks of scholarly
acquaintance, that date back to the Mid-
dle Ages. (To this day, all you need to
gain entry to the Vat is a letter of recom-
mendation from an institution known to
the Librarian or the Prefect.)
Mejía recalled that his Prefect at the
time, Raffaele Farina-now the Cardi-
nal Librarian-knew of a company that
did computerized tagging, and asked for
proposals. "They offered to place a chip
in each printed book, so the position of
this book could be controlled at any mo-
ment. While I was there, the first trial
was done, and it came out very well, so
we decided to do the rest. And, you
know, the library has over a million and
a half printed volumes. But now you can
follow each printed book to see where it
should be-and where it should not be."
Far more important for the many
scholars who have no ready access to the
library, the process of digitizing images
from the Vat's collection of illuminated
manuscripts had begun-an undertaking
that is very much in keeping, in ways that
Nicholas V couldn't have imagined, with
that Popès dream of "the common con-
venience of the learned." "A decision was
taken," Cardinal Mejía went on, making
use of the curious passive construction
that, 1'd noticed, he favored when speak-
ing of events that occurred during his
tenure, "to digitalize the miniatures"-
the hand-painted illuminations in the
manuscripts-"so people could have ac-
cess to the miniatures without seeing the
manuscripts, which we try to keep as
much as possible in their own places, be-
cause they're so precious. So now the
Vatican has a site for these images, and
you can click on an image and see the il-
luminations. Therè s access for anybody."
I t is hard to overstate the importance
that this ideal of intellectual sharing
has for the scholars who work at the Vat.
The amplitude and comprehensiveness
of the library's collection has created an